


Flick of the Wrist

by MonsterParade



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Domestic Shenanigans, General tomfoolery, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Other, Reader's gender is not specified, and it goes about as well as you think it would, but they are AFAB, every chapter is named after a different Queen song because this is MY FIC, this is more like the Bumblee universe than the MTMTE universe, you let a giant robot live in your house with you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-03 06:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17278883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonsterParade/pseuds/MonsterParade
Summary: An enormous robot alien crash-lands in what is essentially your backyard, and the both of you, compelled by peculiar circumstances, invoke upon each other the ancient law of Finders Keepers.





	1. The Complete Works of Queen

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to...the fic.
> 
> I've seen Bumblebee in theaters a couple times now, and I've been inspired and distracted by this idea since about 20 minutes into the first time, so I thought it was about time to bring it to life! I wouldn't classify this as slow-burn; it's really just Burn, like there is going to be a romance and it is developing, that much I can guarantee.
> 
> But anyway, please enjoy Bumblebee 2018 meets The Shape of Water meets Whirl of Polyhex. Updates will almost certainly be sporadic, but I hope you can all bear with me, because I'm really excited to write this!! Also, I'm certainly more inspired when people comment and tell me what they liked, and what they'd like to see, so please tell me any domestic or funny scenarios you'd like me to maybe include in future chapters, in the comments!
> 
> I really hope you enjoy! <3

Staring out from your back porch at the smouldering wreckage of your hobby garden, you feel a few different things at once.  
  
_Grief_ ; your sunflowers, your petunias, gone. Your poppies, your chrysanthemums, wasted. Your poor little seedling strawberry patch, never to grow bigger.  
  
_Anger_ , of course; you'd worked hard on that garden, after all, and those plants had kept you so much company out here, alone in the woods, that they were very nearly _friends_ of yours. Or they had been.  
  
But, most of all, you feel _fear_ ; a blooming fear in the pit of your chest, because _something_ is responsible for the demolition of your greenery and whatever it is, it is _big_ , it is releasing huge plumes of smoke, and it is _on fire_.  
  
You do the sensible thing. You grab the fire extinguisher before you head down.  
  
  
"I haven't even had my coffee yet," you mutter to yourself as you descend the stairs to the back lawn, clutching the fire extinguisher close to your chest in case you need it to cool things off- or to use as an improvised weapon. The wild animals out here got up to some odd stuff sometimes, and you'd had to chase off more than one young black bear with nothing but your own heft and a hastily-grabbed shovel, but whatever _this_ was was still very far from par for the course. You'd watched it- some giant, metallic _thing_ \- streaking down out of the dawn sky like a meteorite. It had singed an enormous black path through the grass where it had landed and skid.  
  
You tread lightly. You've seen alien movies, horror movies, and you want to live.  
  
Unlike in those aforementioned films, the urge to loudly announce yourself to whatever force has invaded your sunflower patch does not actually arise, and you keep yourself deathly silent as you tiptoe through the tulips- a meager few miraculously having survived the fiery impact with singed petals- towards the smoking wreckage. You hold the nozzle of the extinguisher out in front of you like the muzzle of a gun.  
  
It's understandably _difficult_ to navigate through the smoke. As you get closer to the impact point, ash streaks your skin and burns the lining of your nose and throat, making your eyes water behind your glasses, and you trip and stumble more than once. You have to force yourself not to cough through sheer force of will, keeping your head down to pick your way through a veritable field of scattered, burning shards of metal. Whatever came down out of the sky here _definitely_ didn't make it in one piece.  
  
Finally, the toes of your sneakers find the hardened dirt edge of a massive crater in the ground, and you take a cursory look around the area before heading down into it-- not that you can see very far for all the soot. Everything is perfectly still, except you.  
  
You slide down into the pit.  
  
There's metallic wreckage lying in a twisted heap in the center of it, wafting heat and flames. There's some shattered glass, broken pieces-parts, and you distantly think that if someone ever decided to drop a semi-truck from the atmosphere, the result would probably look a lot like this.  
  
"What the _fuck_ ," you say, emphatically.  
  
There's a single beat of silence, and then,  
  
"--Yeah, I was thinkin' that too."  
  
You don't even have time to turn around before you hear the unmistakable sound of a _gun_ cocking somewhere to your left and your blood runs ice-cold.  
  
This is pretty much exactly what you thought would happen. This is pretty much exactly what you were afraid of. Why didn't you call the _cops?_  
  
"Don't shoot!" you yelp, holding your hands up in the air, the fire extinguisher dangling from its nozzle where you clench it. You hear a strange sound, a soft whirring click, from the direction of your unknown assailant, and then suddenly the smoke is billowing away from you, blown back by the gust of a powerful fan and clearing your immediate surroundings. Automatically, you twist around to look.  
  
And trip, fall on your ass, and scream.  
  
At least, you try to scream-- it comes out as more of a squawk, with your throat as constricted by ash as it is. It probably still gets your point across.  
  
Because that is a _robot_ ,  
  
that is a _giant fucking robot_ standing over you, dark blue and solid metal and looking right down at you with one huge yellow robot eye set in a faceless helm. It has wicked-looking claws, too, and in one set of them is holding a gun that looks amusingly small in comparison to the rest of it, but that is still probably half as big as you.  
  
That gun is leveled at your head.  
  
" _Fuck!_ " you exclaim, abandoning the fire extinguisher and crab-walking backwards in the burning soot in an attempt to get as far away from the thing as possible, "Fucking jesus fucking christ! Easy! E-easy!"  
  
The robot stares at you, keeping the gun level but cocking its head to the side while you scramble up onto your feet again, mouth agape. You'd run, every muscle in your body is screaming at you to _run_ , but you can't move. You're _transfixed_.  
  
It's terrifying.  
  
It's beautiful.  
  
The thing is 25 feet tall at least, it has to be, and it's long and lithe and oddly shaped, humanoid placement of limbs with crab-like pincers for hands and thin, gangly digitigrade legs holding it in a half-crouch. Metal blades spin in wide discs on its forearms- the source of the wind that cleared away the smoke, evidently- and there's an out-of-place-looking glass dome making up much of the robot's chest area, looking, strangely, an awful lot like the cockpit of a plane to you.  
  
There are twin guns jutting out just underneath that cockpit, each of these longer than you are tall.  
  
You slowly raise your hands in surrender again, palms flat to the creature, your heart in your throat.  
  
"Don't shoot. Please," you croak.  
  
The robot looks at you. It doesn't move, doesn't blink.  
  
And then it straightens all the way up, says, "Oh, it's just a human!", and laughs.  
  
It sounds just like a person, albeit maybe a person speaking through a bit of tinfoil- and it has a goddamn British accent. You gape at it, unsure how to respond. You're sure your eyes are bugging out of your head like a goldfish's.  
  
"My mistake, fleshy. Thought you were one 'a those guys that blew me outta the air for a second there! You're lucky, you know?" the robot continues, talking to you in between glances at the wreckage around it. "Lucky you caught me off-guard, or you'd be _dead_ right now! Ha hah!"  
  
Ha hah indeed. You feel faint.  
  
You stay where you are, still too shocked to really move and turning green around the gills from anxiety and adrenaline and all the smoke you've breathed in, and after a minute the robot takes notice of your continued silence and looks back at you properly. An antenna on its head waggles at it speaks.  
  
"Oi. Can you hear me down there? A 'thank-you' would be nice." it says, resting its free set of claws on its hip and tapping a foot against the ground. "I _did_ just spare your tiny life."  
  
"Thank you," you manage after a minute, "For not shooting me."  
  
Good manners may be key here, if you want to get through this entire experience un-murdered.  
  
"You're welcome!"  
  
Awkwardly, the two of you watch each other for another moment or two, you tense and deeply confused and the robot unreadable, before you abruptly blurt out in a daze, "You ruined my sunflowers."  
  
"--What?"  
  
You gesture helplessly to the little patch of plants that have exploded into flora-based shrapnel, the crispy husks of a few of which the robot is actually standing on.  
  
"My...my garden. I worked...really hard on that."  
  
The robot lifts up a foot and looks down to where you're pointing, shaking burnt sunflower petals off of its heel.  
  
"Oops."  
  
It doesn't _seem_ particularly sorry, but you don't think you're going to be pushing the point.  
  
"... ...So, um," you begin again, slowly, feeling like you're having some kind of out-of-body experience, "What's...your name?"  
  
You don't even know if this thing has a name. You don't know if that name would even be something you're able to pronounce if it did-- maybe it's just a string of binary or something equally robotic. Maybe the robot has absolutely no interest in playing nice with a human and is going to smush you under its feet like those flowers for asking.  
  
You bite your tongue and wait.  
  
The robot is looking much more intently at you now, and as you lock gazes with it you watch the yellow disc of its eye shrink and then dilate again with an honest-to-god camera zooming sound.  
  
"...Whirl," it says after a minute. It cocks its head to the side again and reminds you a little bit of a bird when it does, like the little sparrows who hang out around the feeder on your back porch. Except this sparrow is not at _all_ little and oh _god_ it's leaning down now.  
  
You cringe in on yourself and freeze as the robot- Whirl- bends over you, anticipating some sort of extreme bodily harm to befall you at any moment now, but when no contact is made after a few moments and you remain in one piece, you gather the courage to look up again, holding your breath.  
  
Whirl is leaned over above you in a full crouch now, holding the hand (claws) with the gun in it in a relaxed position at its side, the other folded across its knees where they bend.  
  
You blink at it. It deliberately blinks back.  
  
"Well?" it prompts.  
  
"Whuh- what?"  
  
"Earthlets not have names too, or you just got bad manners?"  
  
Oh! You hesitantly straighten up a little, watching Whirl to make sure it- _he?_ It's sapient, and you feel awkward thinking of it as an ' _it_ '- doesn't make any sudden moves, not that you could defend if he did. He remains docile, the little antenna on his head continuing to flick like the needle of a metronome.  
  
"Oh. Sorry. It's, um, _______."  
  
" ________,_ " Whirl repeats to himself. "What kinda name is _that?_ You lose a bet or somethin'?"  
  
Well that's-- fucking rude is what that is, and you stiffen up with indignation, biting the inside of your cheek to keep from shooting a look up at thirty feet of gun-toting steel. Whirl seems to catch on anyway, and starts laughing again, stretching out one wicked hooked claw in your direction. _That_ changes your tune _real_ fast. In fact, you twist on the spot and make to bolt, although you don't get more than two steps before the aforementioned claw snags on the back of your shirt collar and tugs you backwards onto your ass. You land in the soot and swear, holding your hands up as a meager defense for your delicate face.  
  
"I'm sorry!"  
  
"Eesh, relax," Whirl scoffs, and that claw pushes your hands aside easily so the flat of it can come down on your head. To your surprise, it doesn't cut you; it brushes through the top of your hair instead, mussing it up while you just lay there flabbergasted. Whirl makes a sound like he's clicking his tongue, which is impossible given the state of his face. "I'm not gonna _hurt'cha._ Just wanted to have a little look-see, that's all. Never seen a _human_ before."  
  
"I've never seen a giant robot," you reply, lying still and letting him mess up your hair to his heart's content. He's surprisingly gentle- doesn't even nick you, even though there's no doubt he could tear you in half without a second thought if he felt like it. You slump a little in relief.  
  
"Day of firsts!" he exclaims. He pats you for a minute more, ruining your hairstyle with almost practiced precision, and then withdraws his claw, bracing his hands on the ground and springing all the way up to his feet again in one fluid motion. The impact when he lands shakes the ground, and you yelp and scramble away to keep from getting trampled.  
  
"Well, _______," he says cheerfully, ignoring the fact that he'd almost smashed you into a pulp just now, "It's been _swell,_ but I _must_ be on my way. You can keep the pod, yeah? I don't need two optics to tell me that thing's never gonna fly again. Consider it a parting gift!"  
  
Whirl stretches his arms up over his head and sighs and turns to leave, evidently planning on disappearing into the stretch of forest in the distance that borders your backyard. You're almost too surprised to react- first you meet a giant talking robot, and now he's just _leaving?_ \- but then Whirl takes a running start and launches himself into the air and all you can do is watch as the top sheets of metal on his body start to fold and shift, into a new and different shape,  
  
and then the _worst_ grinding noise you've ever heard sounds out so loudly it makes your ears ring and Whirl drops back down like a shot duck, face-planting from two stories up with a massive crash and a litany of swears.  
  
You jump to your feet.  
  
"Holy shit- what the hell was _that?_ " you exclaim, heading over at a jog. You watch Whirl's body re-form itself to what it was before, his head still pressed into the ground, and your hand coming very tentatively to rest on his shoulder. You'd expected him to be cold, but his metal is warm to the touch. "Are you okay?"  
  
"Bloody _peachy,_ " he grumbles, and pulls himself free of the earth to sit up. His eye is a narrow slit of anger and there's grass and mud stuck to the prongs on the underside of his helm, and you take a step backwards to watch him brush it away before he cranes his neck down to look at himself. "Well that's just great! What could _possibly_ be wrong? T-cog? I didn't even get hit, you gotta be slagging me! _Bullscrap!_ "  
  
You don't have the faintest idea what a t-cog is, but you gather it has something to do with the way he just ate shit.  
  
"Are you hurt?" you ask. Whirl turns his head to look at you like he'd already forgotten you were there.  
  
"Pfff. No! It takes a lot more than a little _crash-landing_ to put me out of commission. There's probably just- ugh, I dunno, somethin' stuck in a seam or something," he gripes, and begins feeling around the dark plating on his stomach with the tips of his claws, handgun forgotten on the ground where it had skittered away when he landed. You watch him trace the segmentation in the metal curiously.  
  
Underneath the dark metal, you can see slivers of something lighter-colored and softer to the touch, just barely visible through the slats as Whirl passes his claw through them. Bizarrely, you are reminded of the shell of a lobster and the soft meat it protects, and you realize belatedly that he has _armor_ \- so he's not solid metal after all. You wonder if he might be a cyborg then, or an android, or, or something else in that vein...you don't really spend much time pondering it though, because Whirl is growing increasingly agitated as you watch him.  
  
His claws, while massive and dangerous to you, are also too clumsy to get at whatever is bothering him beneath his plating, and the tips of them repeatedly skitter off of the foreign object as he tries to grab it. He slams a pincer down on the ground and makes a series of grating electronic noises, clicks and buzzes. You jump.  
  
"--Hey, you!"  
  
You look up at him nervously.  
  
" _You've_ got tiny little servos," he begins, tapping what would approximate his chin. You raise your eyebrows.  
  
"Tiny little what?"  
  
He ignores you, and continues, "Hows about you be a pal and get up under there for me? Do a mech a favor?"  
  
You purse your lips, glancing between his eye and his claws and his chest-mounted cannons. He's...very dangerous-looking. You're not certain you want to get _that_ close to him, to be honest, but he's looking at you expectantly and you guess he could technically _force_ you if you don't decide to cooperate on your own...besides, maybe he'll owe you a favor if you help him out! Like that story where the mouse pulls the thorn from the lion's paw, but way cooler.  
  
You hum nervously and nod your head, relenting.  
  
"Um, okay, I guess! How do I...what do you want me to do?"  
  
Whirl titters and nudges you closer, tapping along one of the seams in his belly to draw your eye.  
  
"Just use your tiny hands and reach under my plating, feel around a little bit; pull out anything that seems suspicious! Oh, just warn me before you do, or I might snap my plating closed on accident and then we'll _both_ be in trouble!"  
  
Halfway to reaching for him, you freeze, staring up at him in horror. He holds his poker face for a good ten seconds before he starts laughing again, and you exhale in relief, clasping your hands together protectively.  
  
"Aw, I'm only kidding!" he assures you. You keep a wary eye on him, but choose to trust him anyway. If he'd wanted you hurt or dead, you think he would have done it long before now.  
  
"Will this hurt you?" you ask, gingerly allowing yourself to lay a hand on his side, just above the seam he'd been indicating.  
  
"Nah. At the most it'll tickle a little. Have at!"  
  
You do. At first, you spend a minute trying to wiggle your fingertips into the seam and are unable to reach more than a few inches, but then Whirl leans away from you and helpfully fans out his plating to give you space to work, looking like a bird all puffed up for the winter as he lets you move back in. You've never worked on a car before, but you get the feeling this is a distinctly _different_ experience- the softer, lighter surface you'd seen underneath his plating isn't anything you've ever heard of on a car, and it's slippery under your fingers, almost pliable and very warm. You prod it experimentally, and Whirl jumps just a little.  
  
"Oh! Sorry. What is this?"  
  
"That? That's my protoform," Whirl says, very obviously trying not to squirm as your tiny fingers dig around under his armor. "A little to the left, there-- feel anything?"  
  
You reach over as instructed and, after a moment of groping, you do in fact find something. It sticks out noticeably from the otherwise smooth material of his "protoform", and you feel blindly around at it, trying to identify it.  
  
"I think...it's shrapnel," you inform him, "From your, uh, space pod. It feels like it's really _in there_ \- can you feel it?"  
  
You give the hunk of metal a tiny tug, and this time Whirl yelps, making you withdraw from him hastily as he raises a hand like he's going to swat you. You yelp as well.  
  
" _Ow! Yeah,_ I can _feel_ it- ugh, brilliant. It's punctured the protoform, then," he complains. He lowers his claws again, fanning his plating out further, and gestures for you to continue, his foot tapping impatiently against the ground. "Just pull it out."  
  
"Are you sure? You're...oh my god, I think you're bleeding."  
  
Upon inspection, your hands have come away from him streaked with something bright pink and wet, just a little of it, which you rub between your fingers with morbid curiosity. Whirl snorts at you, resting his chin in one claw.  
  
"Yeah I'm sure. That's just a _splinter_ \- I've had worse on the daily. Just ignore the energon and pull it out, yeah? I'm a big mech, I can take it."  
  
"If...you're suuure..." you say slowly, and when Whirl doesn't change his mind, you wipe your hands off on your pants and reach back in again, delicately feeling around for the "splinter". You find it again with little trouble, wrapping both your hands around it as securely as you can, searching for a handhold on the twisted metal. "I'm going to pull now, okay? Please don't chop my hands off."  
  
"Relax," Whirl repeats, and you relent, brace yourself and pull.  
  
For a single moment, the shard of metal in your hands seems like it's going to give-- Whirl emits a soft hiss as you feel it moving in his protoform, and you try to adjust your grip as energon makes the surface slippery-- but that turns out to be a mistake, because your hands slide in the sudden wetness and you lose your purchase, yanking backwards without a handhold and feeling the sharp, broken edge of the shrapnel slice through your palm. You gasp, startled, and jerk your hands back with a curse.  
  
"Ow! Fuck! Shit!"  
  
You grit your teeth and suck in air, blinking away tears. That...is a sizeable cut. Not too deep, but long, spanning almost the entire length of your palm, from the heel to the soft skin between your index and middle finger. God, it got you in the finger-crotch. You immediately clasp your other hand over it, trying to apply pressure as blood starts to well up between your fingers. Whirl's head jerks down to look at you.  
  
"Oh. Whoops." he says.  
  
You blow out a breath and look back up at him, holding your hand to your chest.  
  
" _Fuuuck_ \- I'm sorry, but I really have to go bandage this _right now_ ," you tell him, backing away and letting him rise to his feet. You can see a tiny bit of that pink fluid that works as his blood running out from under his armor, and you feel _awful_ abandoning him to it, but the cut on your hand is burning like fire and the amount of blood that's starting to drip down over your wrist and onto the grass is alarming, to say the least. You can only hope you don't need stitches. And a tetanus shot.  
  
Whirl nods at you, once.  
  
"That's your habsuite over there, yeah?" he asks, jerking his head at your house across the lawn.  
  
"I live there, yes."  
  
"Perfect! I'll just come with you, then!"  
  
You make a face at him, not very sure at _all_ how well _that_ would go. You don't think your home insurance covers 'giant robot'-based damages...but you suppose you could always claim a bear got in. It had happened that one time.  
  
"There is no way you're going to fit in my house, Whirl," you warn him, jerking your head for him to follow you anyway- you're starting to get a little woozy from the sight of your own blood. You are _very_ opposed to letting it leave your body, this way or any other, and while it's probably just anxiety and not blood loss making you dizzy, you don't want to chance anything by waiting around.  
  
"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it." Whirl replies, and follows after you at a slow lope.  
  
____  
  
It only takes a minute for the two of you to make your way back across the lawn, picking through bits of spaceship and destroyed turf, and while you climb the steps to your porch on surprisingly steady legs, you find yourself glancing back, trying to figure out the logistics of cramming a thirty-foot robot through your front door. There's just no way he's going to fit.  
  
"Um...I think you're going to have to stay out here," you tell him, nudging the door handle with your elbow until it finally clicks open enough for you to bump it with your hip. "I'll only be a couple minutes, though, okay?"  
  
Whirl ' _hrm_ 's noncommittally. He's surveying the outside of your house, taking in the bird-feeders and the few missing shingles on the roof and that stone statue of a cat that sits on the steps- he clinks a claw against a wind chime and listens to it jingle.  
  
"Alright. But if you're not back in fifteen I'm coming in after you! I can't just leave this garbage under my plating."  
  
"I'm not gonna _ditch_ you," you say, a little affronted as you step through the door. After a moment's hesitation, you leave it open for him, just in case he wants to peek inside while he waits. You figure you don't have to worry about wild animals sneaking in while Whirl's hovering over the doorway. "I'm just gonna put some gauze on this, wash it out. Maybe grab some gloves," you add as an afterthought.  
  
Whirl doesn't reply to that, so you turn your back on him and hurry into the kitchen, wiping your non-injured hand on a random dish towel so you can look for some bandages in the cabinet. A few drops of blood make it to the floor, but it's nothing you can't clean up later, and you grab yourself a roll of gauze and some tissues and get to work, very gingerly rinsing the cut out in the sink. You fiddle one-handedly with the bottle of rubbing alcohol you keep on the windowsill above it.  
  
You've just taken a breath and steeled yourself to properly clean the wound when there's a knock on the kitchen window and you jump, sloshing alcohol almost everywhere but yourself. You swear.  
  
"Open this," Whirl demands with his voice slightly muffled, rapping against the glass. You wave at him.  
  
"Gimme a minute!"  
  
You really need to take the time to treat this cut properly, considering you have no idea _where_ Whirl's been or what kind of illnesses you could catch from getting his energon in your bloodstream. Hands sopping wet, you put the bottle aside and hurry across the room to unlatch the window, racing the clock to keep your blood from staining the windowsill. Whirl shoves his whole head through the window as soon as it's all the way open.  
  
"Huh," he says, taking a good look around the room, "Cute place. Minibot-sized!"  
  
You don't bother to ask him about that for the time being. You return to the sink instead, and try to focus on what you were doing before instead of the sounds of Whirl trying to cram one of his arms through the window alongside his neck. Man, this rubbing alcohol is going to sting like a _bitch_...  
  
"Please don't break anything," you call over your shoulder, bracing yourself and then just pouring the alcohol out over your cut before you can chicken out. It's much more than you need, and _god_ it burns, but you thump your elbow against the countertop and wait until it passes, laying your palm carefully with tissues afterward. This will have to do until you can get to the hospital. You bind them firmly to your hand with gauze to keep the pressure and then finally turn back to Whirl, flexing your fingers.  
  
Whirl seems to have given up on getting his arms through the window, his chin resting on the windowsill irritably, but he perks up when you look back at him, lifting his head.  
  
"You done? Can we get this show on the road?"  
  
"Yep! I'm just gonna need some gloves, first, and...maybe some pliers? I have some somewhere, you just wait right there!"  
  
Whirl grumbles as you dash off again, dropping his head again with a thunk.  
  
You don't _need_ to help him, you don't _have_ to; it's not like you're the only human around who'd be willing to stick their hands wrist-deep in a robot. But the thought of letting anyone else be a part of the _absolute coolest thing that's ever happened to you_ makes you almost sick, and so you rush to find your materials, desperate to do him one solid and maybe convince him to stick around for a little while. Whirl could be your Iron Giant! You've always hoped there was more out there for you than only _human_ friends.  
  
It's with thoughts of that fantastic friendship-that-could-be that you return to him, with a big pair of work gloves and an old set of pliers that you'd dug out from under the bathroom sink. Whirl sees you coming and pulls his head back out of the window, yelling for you to, "Come on then!"  
  
You head back outside obediently, ignoring his demanding attitude.  
  
  
  
"No stopping this time, right? In, out, done, I patch myself up and we both go on our ways?" Whirl asks, as he crouches down again and you return to the seam on his belly that you'd been working on before. It doesn't seem like it's closing all the way this time, now that the shrapnel underneath has been jostled- it's not laying completely flat like before and Whirl is quick to flare it out again, giving you access to his, er, undercarriage, once more. You just nod, trying to focus on the task at hand.  
  
"I think I might need a light. Do you mind if I shine one up there?"  
  
" _Scandalous_ ," Whirl clucks. You glance up at him, unable to tell if he's joking or not, and he tilts his head at you before snickering and waving a claw. "Go for it."  
  
You pull up your flashlight app on your phone and shuffle in, craning your neck to see up under his plating. Oh, this is _much_ easier- even in the shaky lighting, you can see the out-of-place gleam of the shrapnel right away, and with a little finagling you're able to slide your other arm underneath with the pliers in hand, your arm pressed tight to his protoform in the tight space.  
  
"Hold still, alright?"  
  
Whirl makes a mechanical sound that you take to be assent, and you clasp the pliers firmly around the end of the metal shard, feeling much safer now that you're wearing heavy gloves. You brace your shoulder against his stomach and pull.  
  
To his credit, Whirl doesn't twitch like he's going to smack you this time; in fact, he doesn't even flinch, doesn't even make a sound past a sigh of relief once you drag the jagged shard out from under his plating and dump it aside in the grass. His energon drips out onto your gloves from the puncture and smears his armor, but he pays that no mind and flattens himself back down again with satisfaction, patting his pincer against the smooth metal with a clank.  
  
"Wow, I owe you one!" he says, lifting himself back to his feet with a grunt and dusting himself off. "You ever get a chunk of metal stuck in _you_ , I'll be sure to repay the favor."  
  
"Are you leaving?" you ask, dropping the pliers and shedding your gloves. Whirl blinks down at you.  
  
"Well, yeah. I'm not here to _sight-see_ \- I've got stuff to do! Establish a base of operations, set up a comm. system, _real_ big stuff. Nothing for a little guy like you."  
  
This was what you were afraid of. He's showing no interest in sticking around, and you know it's selfish but you _don't_ want him to just leave you, not after he finally broke the monotony you'd settled into and turned your life irreversibly into something _more_. How could you go back to daily life knowing a giant alien robot was just out there, having slipped through your fingers?  
  
You stare up at him with the saddest eyes you can muster, rubbing your arm with your opposite hand as you interject, " _Or_...you could...you could set up your base _here?_ I've got plenty of room, and there's no other houses around for _ages_..."  
  
Whirl's neck cranes back like a startled bird's and he locks eyes with you.  
  
"...What's your game?" he asks.  
  
"Um- what do you mean? I don't have a _game_. I'm just-- I mean, I'm just a _human_! I've never met a giant robot before! Nothing cool ever happens around here!" you exclaim, "I just...I dunno, I want to know more about you. I wanna get to _know_ you. You're the coolest thing that's ever happened to me."  
  
You are very aware of how foolish it is to offer to host an enormous robot on your land, just out of the blue, a robot who you still know so very little about and who could _so_ easily be here, on Earth, to conquer or enslave or destroy-- but you're still running on adrenaline and you're just selfish enough, have been just lonely enough, that you can stand by your offer without any regret, trying to hold Whirl's gaze as solidly as possible while he stares at you.  
  
Whirl slaps a claw against his forehead and absolutely _busts up_ laughing.  
  
You immediately turn red, mortified and distraught.  
  
"What's so funny?"  
  
Whirl cackles, clanking his claw against his own head, and lifts a foot to nudge you, nearly unbalancing you even with that light touch. His optic is half-open and shining.  
  
"That's adorable! You wanna be _friends?_ Are you that lonely, really? I'm not exactly the nicest Cybertronian out there, you know-- I've killed a lot of people. S' _war_ , of course, but I'm just saying, there's a _lot_ of blood on these claws. And you're sure you wanna to be a part of that?"  
  
You purse your lips tight. _Do_ you? You don't know the state of things back on...wherever Whirl's from, you don't know his circumstances or whether he's good or bad. He certainly looks built to kill, with those guns and pincers.  
  
But he hasn't killed _you_. Not yet, hasn't even tried, even thought it would have been as hard for him as stepping on an ant would be for you. You _want_ to extend your faith to him.  
  
You want to.  
  
"...Do you kill humans?" you ask eventually, when he begins to wind down from his giggle fit. He pretends to wipe his eye even though you're _pretty_ sure it doesn't have to ability to water, and cocks a hip, crossing his arms under his cockpit.  
  
"No. It's the _other_ guys who get all squicked out over organics." he replies. That alone is enough to lift a weight off your chest, and you take a calming breath, offering him a shy but genuine smile. You offer him your hand.  
  
"Then that's more than good enough for me."


	2. Coming Soon- Album: The Game

Since it's so obvious that Whirl will never fit inside your house, the decision is made that you will let him stay inside your barn. Well, it's not really _yours_ , and it's _barely_ a barn-- it had been, at one point, but it was something installed by the previous owners of this house and its land, and it had just sort of come with the package when you'd moved in. It's old and worn and an uninteresting dirt brown color, but it's still structurally intact, and most importantly it's big enough to house your new roommate with a bit of room to spare.  
  
"Wow. This sucks," Whirl had said, when you'd first opened its doors to him, and you'd been inclined to agree. However, once the two of you had removed all the ancient, moldy hay bales from its premises and you'd convinced Whirl to let you watch him tear down the old livestock stalls in an exciting show of destructive power, it had cleaned up rather nicely, leaving nothing but a huge empty building for Whirl to decorate as he pleased.  
  
You're watching him from the yard now reclined in an old deck chair, finally taking the time to have your morning coffee now that it's almost noon.  
  
"Don't come in yet!" Whirl calls out to you for the second time, from behind the closed barn doors. A few minutes ago, he'd walked in there with a little metal cube in his claw that he'd refused to explain and locked the doors on you, and since then there had been a god-awful amount of noise coming from inside, interspersed with reminders to "stay put", just in case "something goes wrong". You didn't have the faintest idea what he could be doing in there, but you figured that was his business and if he wanted to trash his new room or do something weird to it, he was welcome to do so. It wasn't like you'd ever had anything to do with that barn anyway. You kept all your plant supplies in the tool shed.  
  
"I know!" you call back, listening to the rattling. You're hoping the 'yet' in that warning means he's going to let you see whatever he's doing when he's done. In the meantime, you're content to sunbathe, still in your pajama pants and a little over-warm, but cozy.  
  
By the time you finish your coffee and stand up from your lounge chair to stretch, the clattering sounds from inside the barn have petered out to nothing, and shortly, Whirl pokes his head back outside to motion to you. He's squinting, but you can't tell from your amount of experience with his expressions whether he's angry or pleased. You're hoping for pleased.  
  
"Alright, tiny, prepare to have your _mind_ blown," he says as you re-approach the building. "Just keep your little flesh fingers off my stuff, got it?"  
  
You barely manage a nod before Whirl shoves the doors open to the world, letting sunlight stream in, and you peer around the doorway past his ankles, brimming with curiosity. Will it be a spaceship? A teleporter? An arsenal of wall-mounted guns, because he seems like the type?  
  
But no. It's not any of these.  
  
It's...a room. A different room, a bedroom; he's somehow managed to transform the entire interior of the barn into something different, gleaming metal instead of old wood and futuristic furniture that you _definitely_ hadn't seen him carry inside filling the space. You can classify it only as a bedroom because there is, in fact, a bed in there. Albeit a flat metal one.  
  
"What the fuck?" you ask, scrambling inside in shock. Whirl closes the doors behind you with a ' _clank_ ', and you spin in a circle to try to take everything in, trying to figure out how he could have managed to do all this in the roughly twenty minutes he'd been alone. "How did you do this? How the fuck!"  
  
Whirl wanders past you with a pleased swagger to his step to collapse in a chair sized perfectly for him, crossing his weird, spindly legs and wiggling down to get comfy. His eye is narrow again and dimmed, so you make a mental note that that means he's satisfied. He waves a pincer at you.  
  
"Easy! Portable habsuite! One of _Brainstorm's_ inventions. I usually prefer his _guns_ , but I gotta admit, I'm finally glad I hung onto this one! Pretty nifty, right?"  
  
"Nifty isn't the half of it," you reply, and that was obviously a good answer, because Whirl emits a pleased chuff and doesn't snap at you even when you run your 'flesh fingers' lightly across the metal wall. It's cold and solid under your hand. It's _real_ , not just some seamless illusion. "How on Earth did you manage this?"  
  
"You humans have got something similar. You use it when you go out to sleep in the woods in those little bags! Which is _really_ dumb, by the way-- you've got perfectly good habitation suites but you'd _rather_ sleep in the dirt."  
  
It takes a good minute of puzzling before you realize he's talking about camping. Which, yes, is dumb, and you hope to never have to do.  
  
"Oh! A tent? You mean like a pop-up tent?"  
  
"That's the one!" Whirl snips his claws in recognition. You whistle, long and low, still goggling over the change in decor.  
  
"That's _crazy_. Was that what the little box you had was?"  
  
"Yep," Whirl replies, popping the ' _p_ ' sound despite his lack of mouth or lips. He bounces his foot where it's crossed over his knee, and tucks his arms behind his head, looking like the picture of ease as he lounges in his seat. His rotors spin lazily and throw shadows on the floor. "I've slept on worse, in worse, and in worse situations, but this beats roughin' it by a mile. Go on, have a little look around!"  
  
You attempt to take his offer up as best you can, while coming up halfway as tall as the chairs in the room. It's not very _cozy_ in here; it's not _bad_ , but there are no decorations, no knick-knacks, and no soft surfaces at all, and being surrounded by blank steel on all sides is actually making you feel a little claustrophobic. You'll have to get Whirl some pillows or something, and like, a rug, at least.  
  
"Do you sleep on this?" you ask, gesturing to the metal slab that juts out of the wall a good six or seven feet above you. It was what you had first taken for a bed when you'd walked in, although now you were having doubts because of the unyielding appearance  of it. Why bother with a designated sleep spot when it was made of the exact same flat steel as the rest of the room? He might as well sleep on the floor.  
  
Whirl nods.  
  
"That's what a recharge slab is _for_ , innit?" he asks in reply, and waves loosely to what looks like an electrical outlet high up on the wall, set at the far end of the bed. You crane your neck to look up at it. "I plug in there and have sweet nightmares for a few hours every cycle, keep myself in tip-top shape. Can't kill 'Cons if you're sleep-deprived! I tried it once- stayed up three cycles straight before a big battle and ended up blowing my teammate's chassis open instead'a the 'Con I was aiming at."  
  
You make no effort to hide your grimace at Whirl's words, and it only serves to make him chuckle, conspiratorially adding, "He had it coming anyway. He cheated me in a card game once and never paid me back."  
  
_____________________  
  
After your visit with Whirl, during which you find yourself worrying just a little about what kind of person he really is, you spend most of the rest of the day trying to salvage what you can of your lawn and your garden. You go around with a bucket and pick up all the little pieces of shrapnel you can find, dumping them back into the husk of the pod they'd come off of and resolving to deal with that later, and do your best to rake all the upturned earth back into the furrows that had been scraped into the ground. Most importantly, you tend to your garden, and painstakingly dig up and pot the few lucky flowers who managed to survive the explosion of their bed.  
  
You're covered in dirt and sweat by the end of it; two tulips, a handful of poppies, one black-eyed susan and a single sunflower saved. You'll replant them at the far end of your yard later, far away from your new guest and any other fires he might cause.  
  
Whirl does not help, just watches you from where he leans in the doorway of the barn with a blank look on his face.  
  
It's just barely turning dusk when you finally throw in the towel, smacking dirt off of your jeans with your good hand and waving to catch Whirl's eye.  
  
"I'm gonna go have dinner and take a shower now," you call out to him, motioning towards your house. "Do you need anything before I go?"  
  
"Nnnope."  
  
"Uh...okay. Okay! Well, um...I'll probably go to bed after that, so...goodnight, Whirl. See you in the morning."  
  
"Sleep tight," Whirl replies, looking not at you but with his helm turned upwards towards the dimming sky. You wave again, he doesn't respond, and you awkwardly take your leave and return to your home by yourself, locking the front door behind you.  
  
Dinner passes without event.  
  
You put a frozen pie in the oven for dessert, and opt to take a shower in the meanwhile, although you are uncharacteristically quiet for the duration of it and don't end up singing like you usually do. You keep a careful ear out for disturbances outside instead, and towel and dress quickly. Just in case.  
  
It's just when you're beginning to finally wind down and relaxing on the couch, channel-surfing for garbage and eating pie straight out of the tin on your lap, that your doorbell chimes merrily and startles you once more. You frown. Leaving the pie on the sofa, you leave your comfy nest of blankets and cushions and hurry to answer the door, looking out the peephole before opening it.  
  
A huge stretch of matte blue is blocking out the entire thing, and the door thumps twice, loudly, during your hesitation.  
  
You open the door.  
  
"Hi again, Whirl," you greet him. Whirl is hunched over on the front porch outside, nearly bent double in order to look you in the eye, and he waves at you with one massive claw, his mood and intentions still unreadable to you. "Is everything okay?"  
  
"Oh, sure. All good here! I was just laying around, and I got to thinking- I showed you mine already. You should show me yours!" he says.  
  
You blink up at him wide-eyed, your eyebrows shooting up.  
  
"Excuse me?"  
  
"Your habsuite! Can I come in or not?"  
  
Oh. Oh! Of course that's what he meant. Not _usually_ what people meant with that particular phrasing, but he could certainly be forgiven for the confusion given his circumstances. You give him a once-over and clear your throat.  
  
"Um...actually, I'd love to invite you in, but- you don't _fit_ , remember? You could barely get your head through my window." you remind him carefully. Whirl snorts (something of a feat) and pokes you in the chest, tilting you backwards a little and thankfully missing your tits with the jab.  
  
"That's not a problem! Watch and learn, pipsqueak."  
  
You yelp and cover your chest with your hands, rubbing where he'd prodded you, but you do take a step back and watch to see what he does, hoping it doesn't involve tearing your doorway apart to force himself inside.  
  
It doesn't. Whirl takes a few steps back too, in fact, and then some mechanical part of him begins to audibly grind and before your eyes, his shape begins to change again, although this time in a different way-- he's getting _smaller_. His plating is shifting rhythmically, almost like paper being folded, and each cycle of it takes a few inches of height off him, until the grumbling sounds finally slow to a stop and you're standing, flabbergasted, in front of a robot who has now more than _halved himself_ in size. Whirl apparently either takes your silence as approval or just decides he doesn't care, because he just laughs to himself and eases past you, still having to duck his head to fit through the doorway as you let yourself be brushed aside.  
  
You manage to close the door on muscle memory.  
  
"Woooow, not bad," Whirl remarks, letting himself into your living room and standing, head tilted, in the middle of it with a stance that reminds you of the raptors from Jurassic Park. "Aw, brilliant, you've got a tv! What settles for entertainment around here?"  
  
"Uh," you reply blankly. Whirl just continues talking and grabs the remote off the arm of the couch, struggling to hold it between the sharp tips of his pincers.  
  
"Hey, don't mind me. Take a load off, pretend I'm not even here."  
  
Of course. Because that's so easy with him taking up half of the room. You decide to give it a shot anyway, though, in the interest of not offending your guest, and scooch your way past him to get back to the couch, tucking yourself back into your blanket nest and holding your hand out.  
  
"Remote, please," you prompt him, making a grabby motion. Whirl attempts to toss it to you and it lands halfway in your tin of pie. _Hm_. "...That's...fine."  
  
You just set the now-sticky remote aside on the end table and resume scrolling through the channels with just your index finger on the button. Whirl remains where he is, his neck twisted around to look at the screen, and he's actually blocking about half of the tv with his massive body but you're a little too nervous to correct him about it-- you end up settling for watching the left half of the X-Files, in between curious glances at Whirl.  
  
What's the _etiquette_ in this situation? If he were a human, you'd offer him a seat, cut him a slice of pie off of the part of it you haven't eaten around...but he doesn't appear to have any visible mouth, and you worry that if he were to sit on your sofa, the weight of him might actually collapse the old thing.  
  
"Oh, hey! I know this one."  
  
You look up at Whirl in surprise, doing a double-take between him and the screen.  
  
"You've seen the X-Files?" you ask. "H... _how_?"  
  
Come to think of it, you haven't actually even asked him where he comes from yet. Since he and his little spaceship fell out of the sky, you had _assumed_ that he was an alien, but...well, it had felt like that might be a rude question earlier.  
  
Whirl just shrugs and finally decides to move, eyeing the couch for a long minute before deciding to invite himself and sprawling back onto the cushion furthest from you. The couch squeaks alarmingly under his weight and tilts up off the floor.  
  
"Eh, an old friend of mine. He was _obsessed_ with human media," he explains, pretending not to notice the way you're forced to cling one-armed to the arm of the sofa to keep from sliding down. You hastily balance the pie tin with your other hand and try to think of a way to rectify _this_ new situation. "Was. Is? _Is_ he still alive? I should really check in sometime- it's a _shame_ I refused his comm. number."  
  
The way he says that makes you think that maybe he and this _old friend_ were _not_ so close, but then again, something you're beginning to notice about Whirl is how oddly flippant he seems when talking about gruesome topics. It's...a little worrisome, to be honest, but you don't know anything about his species or societal norms and resolve yourself to try and be understanding, nodding along as he talks. He glances at you out of the corner of his eye and huffs, sounding amused.  
  
"What, you _don't_ wanna sit on my lap? That stings, little buddy."  
  
Before you can even puzzle out whether he's being sarcastic, Whirl shifts his weight and sprawls his limbs out a little wider and your side of the couch settles itself back onto the floor with a 'thunk'. It leaves his gangly arm draped across the back of the sofa behind you, sharp claws glinting in your peripheral.

You very briefly have a thought about that old yawn-and-stretch maneuver people in movies often do, and then dismiss the thought entirely with a laugh to yourself almost as quickly.

"...Sooo..." you begin, returning your gaze to the antics of Mulder and Scully on the television while you search for something to make this less _awkward_ , "I never actually asked. Where, uhm, are you from? And what _are_ \-- no, that's rude-- what's your _species_? Other than...robot."

Whirl side-eyes you while you pretend not to look at him, returning to your pie just to keep your mouth busy.

He bounces a foot.

"Cybertron. I'm Cybertronian. It's a pretty nice planet- or it was, once you got past all the _war_ and the _function-ism_ and the government-sanctioned _maiming_. Might even wanna go back some day!"

That sounds...fucking terrible? The maiming part especially- you're not nearly at a level in your acquaintanceship with Whirl that you'd feel comfortable trying to navigate a topic like that...so you choose to ignore it.

"You...keep mentioning a war. So you're a solider then?" you eventually ask. It's not _great_ small talk, but it, at least, is an atrocity you're more familiar with. Whirl nods his head at you so fast that it bobbles.

"Oh, I'm more than just another soldier! I'm part of- or well I _was_ \- an _elite_ group of highly-trained, daredevil, ne'er-do-wells called _the Wreckers_. We were the best of the best! The worst of the worst! The cream of the crop, and all that."  
  
"Like Black Ops?"  
  
"Yeah! Like Black Ops."  
  
"So what happened?" you ask, marveling silently to yourself over the fact that your guest is not only an alien, he's an alien _soldier_ , a top-of-his- _class_ alien soldier who seems to have gotten distracted watching tv, just now. That, or he's stalling his answer, and either way you don't push the point.  
  
The two of you sit and watch the X-Files in silence for a few minutes instead. You're trying very hard not to stare at Whirl, but you honestly just can't _help_ it; his design and all of his intricate parts are just so eye-catching up close, without the haze of fear dulling your senses. You end up side-eyeing him something fierce, wondering if he'd let you feel all the cool joints and seams on his weird bird legs.  
  
"...Anyway!"  
  
You jump at the sudden exclamation and snap your gaze back to his face, hoping you haven't been caught ogling.  
  
"I'd ask what _your_ story is, fleshy, but I'm gonna be honest here-- I don't really care," Whirl says. "No, actually, I really _don't_ care. But thanks for inviting me in! This has been swell. Dream sweet dreams of me while you recharge, yeah?"  
  
"Oh- you're leaving? Already?"  
  
Whirl has already hopped back to his feet again, jostling the sofa and as an extension, you, and you stand up as well to follow him, trying not to be offended by his blunt disregard for who you are (when _you're_ the one who gave him a place to stay). You'd kind of been hoping this would be a _bonding_ sesh, to be honest-- although seeing as Whirl is already making his way back to the door, that is evidently not the case. But you've barely learned anything about him!  
  
Whirl reaches out to pat your head with a pressure that's just this side of painful and with his free claw tries to turn the doorknob.  
  
"Yep! I know, like you said, I'm the coolest thing ever, but _this_ coolest thing ever likes his personal time," he says, the door making an upsetting crunching sound as he tries to get purchase on it. You spring forward to open it for him before he can destroy the only thing keeping the nighttime wildlife out of your house. "So don't come knocking, got it? I'll see you when I see you."  
  
Well...well, that is disappointing. But you suppose that's his decision.  
  
"Um- okay. It was nice to see you, Whirl- goodnight," you say, and step back so he can squeeze past you back out the door. He turns his back on you as soon as he's past the doorframe, waving a claw without looking back, and you stand there on the welcome mat for a few moments more to watch him walk away, goggling as his body smoothly restores itself to its previous size in between steps. You have _so_ much to learn about this guy- and if tonight is any indication, you're probably going to have to fight for all of it.  
  
It fills you with a mix of trepidation and delight. Now there's something to look forward to.  
  
You lock the door behind yourself, only a little disappointed, and return to your sofa blanket nest alone, settling back in for the night with a big dumb smile on your face. ...You can't _wait_ to have a giant robot for a best friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, hey! Here's to my first update, and to many more! I know this chapter is a little lack-luster, not a lot happens in it, but we'll get things moving soon, I promise. :3
> 
> Please let me know if there's anything specific you want to see from this fic, and keep an eye out if you like, because chapter three is already in the works! Thanks for reading!!


	3. Cover Art!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flick of the Wrist now has cover art!!

This isn't an actual chapter, but: Consider this the cover art for this fic! This picture was done by cyanideoreo on tumblr as a trade for a written piece, everybody go give them some love! And thanks again, Oreo!! (you may have to click the image for best viewing!)  
  



	4. Radio Ga-Ga -- Album: The Works

The two of you actually start to settle in pretty easily after that.

Summer swells, ripe and hot, to its peak outside, sprouting swathes of yellow dandelions and patches of springy clover in the yard, and you start spending more and more time with your doors and windows open, trying to save on electricity.

Whirl, for his part, makes a proper habit of dropping in on you in the evenings to crash on your couch and talk over the television, and if he notices any change in the weather, he doesn’t mention it, seemingly unaffected by even the most sweltering heat.

It’s oddly companionable.

Agreeing to host your Cybertronian guest on your land, you had simply assumed at the time that it would come hand-in-hand with some kind of chaos, and in a way that’s true; Whirl shows a marked disregard for social cues, makes a mess of your house on the daily, and you have woken up more than once to the shocking sight of his massive glowing eye staring at you through your bedroom window.

But aside from you learning to sleep with your curtains closed, you find that Whirl is a welcome change to your life and to your routine, and once you’ve taken the time to establish some very basic boundaries, the two of you actually get along like a house on fire.  
  
  
Right up until the day you come home from work and your front door is off its hinges.  
  
You stop in the driveway with your car door still open, and stare at the empty doorway with growing apprehension. This could probably mean one of two things. One; Whirl has gotten bored in your absence, and in light of you stubbornly refusing to get him his own key, has let himself inside via another method at his disposal.  
  
Or two; someone _else_ is in your house, someone big enough or brutish enough to just pull your door off its hinges, and are possibly waiting for you inside to ambush and kill you. You’re out far enough in these parts that no one would know for _ages_.  
  
You’re starting to think maybe you shouldn’t have watched those crime shows with Whirl last night.  
  
Alarmed, you glance back and forth between the barn and your house– should you go get Whirl? Or should you deal with this on your own? Whirl offers safety and protection, at least in theory (you’ve never actually asked him what he would do if someone threatened you in front of him), but you’re also supposed to be keeping him on the _down-low_ , for his own safety. Would it be worth it to risk him getting discovered if someone _is_ in your house?  
  
No. No, you decide, it wouldn’t be. You haven’t known Whirl for more than a few weeks, but you’d rather fist-fight an intruder than let the government find out about your companion and drag him away from you to do…god _knows_ what kinds of horrible things.  
  
You close your car door as quietly as you can, right after grabbing the screwdriver you keep in the glove-box specifically for self-defense purposes. You hold it in a tight overhand grip and advance on the house.  
  
As you make it to the doorway, you sidestep the actual door where it lays on the porch, two huge puncture marks in it that go straight through, and listen closely- you can hear someone rattling around, in the kitchen, you think.  
  
If you come in through the _back_ door, then, you can get the _drop_ on–  
  
“Hey! You’re home!”  
  
You nearly jump a foot in the air as Whirl’s grating electronic voice assaults your ears.  
  
“ _Fuck!_ Jesus!” you exclaim, and drop the screwdriver, hurrying into the house as your anxiety fades away to be replaced with relief. No telling _what_ Whirl has done to your home, but at least it’s _him_ and not a murderer.  
  
Whirl pops his head around the corner of the kitchen doorway as you hurry to meet him.  
  
“Welcome back! How was work?”  
  
“Whirl, what the fuck!”  
  
“Wow. That bad, huh?”  
  
He is _deliberately_ misunderstanding you. You know it, and _he_ knows you know it, and he still has the audacity to squint his eye at you in that cat-like, cheerful fashion as he waves to you with a claw full of wires.  
  
Wait. Wires?  
  
You all but skid into the kitchen with horror dawning anew, and your fears are immediately realized as you look upon the wreckage of every single electronic device in the room. God, he even got your Hello Kitty toaster…! That thing is nearly as old as you are!  
  
“Whirl!” you moan, horrified. Whirl blinks deliberately at you from where he’s wrist (rotor?) deep in the guts of your microwave, and glances around at the carnage with his eye wide, like he’s seeing it for the first time.  
  
“What? This? Huh. When did all this happen?”  
  
You don’t even dignify that with a response– you fix him with your most lethal glare instead, your hands balled into fists on your hips and your lips pursed to keep you from saying anything in your anger that you might regret. Whirl regards you with a mixture of mischief and heavy amusement.  
  
“Aw, don’t look at me like that,” he says, tossing aside the clump of wires in his claw and digging back into the microwave to feel around inside. “You weren’t home, and I can’t turn those doorknobs with my claws! Maybe if you’d installed pull handles instead, we wouldn’t _be_ in this position.”  
  
“Not that! _This!_ ” you snap, and wave your hands emphatically around at the disaster zone he’s made of your kitchen. Whirl starts chuckling.  
  
“Ohhhh. Right. This.”  
  
He pauses for a moment here, still snickering, to duck his head down and peer inside the guts of the microwave, and fishes something out that looks the same to you as all the rest of the mechanical carnage, but makes him chuff in satisfaction.  
  
“Sorry about that! I’ve been having some technical troubles back at my hab, you see, and I didn’t have the parts to fix it. So, you know,” he continues, turning the part over in his claw, “What are neighbors for, amirite?”  
  
You close your eyes, take a long breath in through your nose, remind yourself that Whirl could throw you through the wall, and slowly exhale. You then open your eyes again and dig your fingers into your temples.  
  
“What…jesus. What are you even fixing?”  
  
Before he can answer, realization dawns on you, and anger gives way to worry as you hustle over to him to grab his wrist, holding him still to look him over as he startles and squawks.  
  
“Wait, are you _hurt?_ Are you fixing _yourself?_ ”  
  
Whirl twitches like he’s thinking about backhanding you across the room for grabbing him, but seemingly changes his mind as he starts to laugh instead, screechy and abrupt and _hard_. You let go of him with a frown.  
  
“ _No!_ Are you kidding me? You couldn’t fix a Cybertronian with parts like _these!_ ” he exclaims, shoulders shaking. He waves the microwave bit in your face for emphasis. “No. No. This– this is for my _radio._ Anybody could put _that_ together. Even you!”  
  
He’s still chortling as you try to hide the hurt that crosses your face, smoothing it over with a scowl. His sense of humor is still very…grating.  
  
“You don’t have to be rude,” you shoot back. Then you sigh. “What do you need a radio for, anyway?”  
  
Whirl stares at you for a long minute.  
  
After about thirty seconds of unbroken eye contact, you start to get twitchy, wondering if somehow you’ve offended him or if maybe he just didn’t understand the question…but then Whirl snips his claws like someone with fingers might snap, and squint-smiles at you, like he's just realized something.  
  
“–-That’s right! _E.T. phone home,_ ” he says, watching your face for your reaction, and when the words don’t seem to immediately click, he deliberately clears his throat, adding, “It’s a reference. Seriously? I spend all my time consuming human media to better connect with you and _this_ is the thanks I get?”  
  
Suddenly abashed, you open your mouth to apologize– you hadn’t realized he’d been _studying_ for your sake, via old movies or otherwise– but you don’t get a chance to because he _cackles_ again and finally stands up, leaving the husk of the microwave behind where he’d been crouching over it on the floor.  
  
“I’m screwing with you! Everybody’s seen that movie.”  
  
What. An asshole. If he was a human, you'd have kicked his ass by now.  
  
Luckily for the both of you, you're distracted from your aggravation as soon as his previous words start to sink in.  
  
"Phone home," you repeat, an idea slowly dawning on you, and then your hand flies up to cover your mouth as you realize, "Oh my god, I never even asked if you were coming alone! Oh my god. Whirl, are you going to bring your friends here too?"  
  
Because while that prospect is wildly exciting (what would more Cybertronians be like? Would they all look like him?), you're just not sure you have enough room for any more giant robots in your barn...in fact, no, you're almost certain you _don't_. Where would you put them all?  
  
Whirl makes a 'pfft' sound in response to your look of wonder and raps on his chest with a claw.  
  
"Wouldn't you like to know? Look, squishy," he begins, popping open the cockpit on his chest that you hadn't known actually opened before now. Inside it is a small mountain of bits and pieces of stolen machinery, and he drops the most recent microwave part in with the rest of them before he continues, "I'm part of something real _big_. _Bigger than you_ big. Bigger than your _planet_. So hows about you just trust ol' _Whirl_ with the details, and you don't worry your tiny little head about it?"  
  
What he means, of course, is "I'm not fucking telling you", but you can at least appreciate that he chose not to use those exact words.  
  
You still frown at him.  
  
"I...I mean, I _would_ like to know, since you're kind of living with me? Are your friends going to hurt anyone when they arrive?"  
  
"'Course not! We're the _good guys_. Now shut your trap if you wanna see what I'm doing, and come on already."  
  
You cover your mouth again to try to hide your delight as you hurry to follow after him, allowing yourself to be distracted. Oh! Finally! You're bonding!  
  
_______________________________  
  
  
" _That's_ a radio?"  
  
That doesn't look anything like a radio. It looks...well, it looks like a piece of alien tech, you suppose, a weird tumble of metal sitting on the table in Whirl's room with a singular antenna jutting up off it. It looks a little, uh, crispy, to be honest. You politely don't say so.  
  
"Huh? Oh, yeah, it looked better before the pod crashed. I'm just glad I could salvage what I did!"  
  
"Ah."  
  
You're not quite sure what to do in this situation, really-- you're flattered that Whirl has finally (sort of) asked you to be a part of something he's doing, but as he approaches the table and opens his cockpit to start shoveling scrap out of it alongside the radio, you realize that you're _much_ too short to be able to see what he's doing. Standing on your tip-toes doesn't help in the slightest, and there's nothing nearby for you to climb up on.  
  
"Uh- Whirl?" you prompt shyly. He barely glances back at you, distracted with lining up parts.  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"I...can't see. From here."  
  
Now he actually turns to look at you, tipping his head to the side, like somehow your modest five-and-a-half feet of height had completely escaped him.  
  
"Oh! That's right, you're _tiny!_ " he exclaims. You scrub a hand over your face-- rub it in, why don't you-- but he crouches down before you can complain and stretches his claws out towards you, which prompts an immediate and reflexive flinch as cool metal fixes itself around your middle. You go stiff, suddenly very worried. Whirl is _big_ and those claws are _powerful_. You can feel the faint hum of machine parts traveling down his arms as he lifts you, and you're so preoccupied with clinging to his wrists and sucking in your belly to avoid being chopped in half that you don't even remember to protest, just trying not to think about the suppressed power behind those pincers and the image of your delicate human body cleaved in half.  
  
You're honestly surprised when you're plopped back down on the tabletop all in one piece.  
  
"T-thank you," you breathe, hurriedly patting your hands along your midsection to make sure you're not cut or bleeding. There's not even a bruise.  
  
"Sure," Whirl waves you off along with a little dip of his head and turns his attention back to the radio and the scrap pile, although he looks distinctly pleased with himself for reasons you're not privy to. "You can be my little helper! Hand me that thingy next to you, will ya?"  
  
You follow his line of sight and obediently pass him the desired 'thingy', just pleased to be a part of something.  
  
He reaches out with one set of claws to take it from you, but before you can make contact something inside the metal plating begins to whir and you automatically jerk back at the sound, watching in wonderment as the tips of his claws peel back and separate to reveal delicate, prong-like attachments, about the size of your palm each. Your eyebrows shoot up in undisguised glee as he uses those newly-revealed prongs to take the requested part from your hands.  
  
"You've got _feely-dealies!_ " you coo in delight. Whirl barks a laugh and nearly drops the piece he's holding as he cranes his neck down to look at you, his opposite set of claws splitting themselves apart in the same manner to pop open a hatch on the radio.  
  
"Yeah, well, when you've got big heavy claws like me, you need attachments like these or you'll go right out of your head," he replies, and flexes one pair of the prongs at you, like a little claw-machine grabber. You reach out to touch on impulse and only barely remember yourself in time.  
  
You snatch your hand back.  
  
"Oh! May I-- can I touch? It's okay if you don't want me to."  
  
Whirl blinks his eye at you and makes a short humming sound, turning his head back to the radio. He pries something burnt out of it, scrapes away some crusted ash, and replaces it with the part you'd handed him, those little grabbers proving surprisingly dexterous as he reconnects a wire and clips things into place. You just watch him work, mesmerized.  
  
"I guess you can." he eventually says. He says it flippantly, like it doesn't matter one way or the other to him, but there's something tense about the way he offers you his claw that makes you tread lightly nonetheless, stretching out your fingers to let him lay the prongs across them. You are kind of reminded of a tuning fork as you look them over.  
  
"These are so _cool_ ," you tell him appreciatively, as you gently run your index finger over all the little joints in the grabbers and feel the metal flex in response to your touch, like something alive. "Do all robots have these? Er, Cybertronians, sorry."  
  
Whirl goes still. It's just for a second, and if you hadn't been holding onto him you probably wouldn't have noticed it at all, but he does-- the ambient machine whirring of his body stops for just that moment and his claw twitches in your grasp, like he's going to yank himself away.  
  
And then he's laughing again, and everything clicks back on inside him just like it never stopped. He pinches the prongs of his claw around your hand and bobbles it up and down instead, in a mimicry of a handshake, leaving you no time to ponder what exactly just happened there before he's withdrawing himself from your grip again and gesturing for another part on the table.  
  
"Just make yourself useful and gimme that thing." he orders. You're all too happy to obey, and let yourself be distracted again as Whirl gets back to work on the radio, chattering aimlessly at you to fill up the silence. He never does answer the question.  
  
_____________________________  
  
"Good job, tiny! I think we did it!"  
  
Whirl stands back to admire his work with his claws on his hips, listening to the newly-repaired radio beep and chirp, and you clap your hands and bounce in place to show your support. It still looks weird and scrunched-up, but you suppose as long as it works the aesthetics aren't that important. You grin up at him and stretch your arms.  
  
"Congratulations! Are you going to 'phone home', now? Can I watch?"  
  
Whirl clucks at you like he's clicking his tongue, even as he leans back over the table to rest his spindly elbows on it and poke you with the tip of a claw. He snags himself on your shirt and you hurry to unhook him before he tears it.  
  
"Do you really want to? Wouldn't you rather go back to your hab and, I dunno, do whatever it is humans do when they don't have cool Cybertronian warriors to mess with?"  
  
"No, not really."  
  
"Then sure! Why not!"  
  
Whirl may be loud and antagonistic and confusing, but at least he's usually a good sport.  
  
Following Whirl's lead, you crowd yourself in closer to the radio and watch him fiddle with the dials, static buzz dimming and intensifying in bursts as he searches for the right frequency. Careful to mind your manners, you keep quiet, pursing your lips closed tight, and you even cover your mouth and nod as he warns you to, "Keep it down, got it?".  
  
He then leans in, with his clawtip on a button. And starts to talk.  
  
It's not English. You're suddenly very glad for your hands pressing your mouth closed and choking off your delighted squeal, because it's not even _remotely_ English, not even a human language, as far as you can tell. Whirl has his _own language!_ Or, well, Cybertronians do. Which makes _sense_ , but making sense doesn't make it any less exciting to hear for the first time.  
  
You may be the very first human to ever hear Cybertronian with your own ears! How cool is that!  
  
You're over the moon as you listen to Whirl speak, making all kinds of machine noises, beeps and clicks and hums and whirs, some stringing together and some distinctly separate as individual words to you. He's making a strange thrumming sound behind it all as well, something you actually feel more than you can hear, like heavy music that's very far away. It vibrates under your skin and gives you goosebumps.  
  
Whirl makes a deliberate clicking noise and then stops, taking his clawtip off the button and cocking his head, and you mimic him, holding your breath. Waiting for a reply.  
  
You keep waiting.   
  
It doesn't come.  
  
After a minute you look warily up at Whirl, worried he's going to take the lack of response poorly (you would if you were in his place), and you're all ready to try to reassure him and calm him down-- but when you catch his eye, he blinks back down at you and then just shrugs, scoffing with a rush of air from the vents set into his shoulders. He thumps the radio with a claw.  
  
"Eh, don't look so worried!" he exclaims, "Maybe I'll take it up somewhere higher tomorrow and try it again. No biggie! It's not like you're in any rush to get rid of me, are ya?"  
  
"Of _course_ not!" He's probably teasing, but you don't want to take any chances. You relax from your tensed position and lean over to pat his claw. "You can stay for as _long_ as you want. Believe me, I've had worse roommates."  
  
Whirl raises his free claw and pats your shoulders heavily in a mimicry of what you're doing, nearly knocking you over in the process.  
  
" _Thanks_ , little buddy," he replies sardonically. His eye shutters itself to a half-moon, drooping at you like someone hooding their eyelids, and he plucks you up by the back of your shirt before you even have a chance to process him moving, leaving you yelping and scrabbling at his arm again as he dangles you along with him on his way back to the door. "Speaking of terrible roommates, why don't we head on back to your habsuite and find something more fun to do? Monster movie marathon, anyone?"  
  
" _Whirl-!_ "  
  
"Hah! I'm so glad you agree!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My goodness, thank you so much to everyone who's shown me their support for this fanfiction!! I've read each and every one of your replies and they make me so happy to hear! <3 <3  
> I hope you enjoyed chapter four, and I hope you'll forgive me if it's just a little short- there is more coming up in the very near future!! Thank you all very much for your love and patience!


	5. Killer Queen-- Album: Sheer Heart Attack

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was proofread by the wonderful swaggietrash here on AO3, thanks so much again buddy!!! And as always, let me know what you guys think! <3 Happy reading!

Summer marches on.  
  
After Whirl's little _destructive spree_ regarding your kitchen appliances, you've started working some overtime at your job, trying to scrape together enough money to replace some of the more necessary things-- your blender you can live without, but considering that your diet is comprised of 99% frozen dinners, you _need_ a microwave-- and in the interest of giving Whirl something to do while you're gone that doesn't involve property damage, you've finally caved to him and started leaving your front door unlocked while you're gone, after making him promise to keep an eye on things and not let anyone else into the house.  
  
At least if he's watching tv all day, he can't get into too much other trouble (right?).  
  
Which is why you're unworried when you come home early one day and the front door is slightly ajar. You sigh and nudge it shut behind you as you walk inside, 'tsk'ing to yourself as you pull your shoes off, but you don't really think anything of it past wondering if any wildlife has decided to make itself at home while you were out. You shrug your jacket off and make your way into the living room.  
  
Surprisingly, Whirl isn't in there. He's not lounging on the couch like he normally is, with his weird spindly legs dangling over the arm of it and his head propped up on his claws, and he's not hanging out in the kitchen, either, where he has been expressly banned from entering after _last time_. Sometimes you swear he waits for you in there just to see you get mad at him.  
  
"Whi-i-i-rl! I'm home!" you call out, double-checking the back porch to make sure he hasn't wandered outside at some point. Nothing outside but the bird feeders. Hm.  
  
He _better_ not have gone back to the barn and forgotten to close your door behind him when he left. One snake winding up inside your house by accident was already too many snakes.  
  
You grab yourself a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge and head for the stairs.  
  
Whirl rarely bothers to go up to the second floor of the house, probably because the television is downstairs, but a couple of times at least you've found him in your bedroom, digging through your things or making himself comfortable on your bed. He's probably busy crushing the springs of your mattress underneath his ridiculous weight, you imagine.  
  
You're heading for your room with the full intention of badgering Whirl out of your bed so you can take a nap, but a muffled clunking sound from the bathroom as you pass it by has you faltering, stopping with an affectionate sigh as you hear the slosh of water through the door. So he's finally managed to turn the faucets on with his claws, huh. That can only bode well. You shake your head and open the door, confident to enter unannounced seeing as Whirl wears no clothes to begin with and cannot be caught in any state of undress.  
  
That confidence is promptly shattered, of course, as you make eye contact with the _human person_ lounging in your tub.  
  
" _Holy shit who the fuck are you?_ " you yelp, your heart leaping up into your throat in a sudden mixture of fear and mortification. Your attention is torn three ways at once, as you simultaneously try to keep an eye on the naked person, very much _not_ look at the naked person, and scrabble for something on the bathroom counter that you could use as a weapon to chase this person out. You end up with an open safety pin clutched in your hand like the world's tiniest dagger.  
  
The person in the tub jumps so hard that their bubble bath sloshes over the sides, their singular visible eye popping open comically wide.  
  
"Whoa, easy! Relax! It's me!"  
  
" _... ... Whirl?"  
  
_That doesn't make any goddamn sense.  
  
The person-- yes, Whirl, you're certain now, you'd recognize that voice a mile away regardless of his new form-- gives you a glare from where you've interrupted his bath time and sits up in the bubbles to look at you, froth clinging to the ends of his damp pigtails from where they've been trailing in the water. You hurriedly crane your head back and look down at him over the bridge of your nose so you won't see anything below his neck.  
  
"Of course it's me! You trying to give a mech a spark attack?" he complains. He shifts in the tub and stretches out, settling again, and resumes a lounging position with his ankles crossed and feet propped up on the faucet before his irritation fades and he shoots you a sly grin. "You like it? It's my holoform! Stormy-- that's Brainstorm-- made it for me back on my old ship! _Finally_ got it working again, it must'a got all slagged up when I crashed."  
  
You blindly set the safety pin back down on the counter and stare at the ceiling, feeling like a voyeur.  
  
"Uh, um, I'm sure it's really beautiful, Whirl," you manage, awkwardly rubbing the back of your neck and trying not to turn red. Sure, it's a hologram (holo _form?_ ), but Whirl is your friend and you were _not_ prepared to see _anyone's_ naked tits today but your own and you can still see him grinning at you from under your lashes, his body twisting so he can rest one arm on the edge of the tub and prop up his head.  
  
"Aww. Don't be shy." he teases you. "But I guess this holoform _must_ be a good one if you won't even look at it, huh?"  
  
He lifts a leg out of the water to admire it while he talks, dark skin criss-crossed with wicked scars and dripping soap onto the floor. You just shrug, unsure of what to really do to play off the awkwardness of this situation.  
  
"I, uh-- I'm just gonna go take a nap for a little while, okay? I'll leave you to your bath," you say, staring aimlessly at a tile on the ceiling and the weird stains on it. "Drain the tub when you're done, alright? And... and also, I would _love_ an explanation about this holoform thing later, if you don't mind, because what the _fuck_."  
  
You've already seen _so_ much more than you wanted to see.  
  
Whirl snorts at you and sinks low in the bubbles, sloshing water around and plastering his pigtails to the wet skin of his collarbone. He idly picks at a burn scar on his arm.  
  
"Alright then, whatever. See you later, munchkin."  
  
You wave and smile in his general direction and then make your very hasty escape, quietly closing the bathroom door behind you. You feel like a pervert, and you can hear Whirl chuckling to himself through the door as you retreat. You're going to have to have a talk with him later about acceptable boundaries for wearing his human suit.  
  
\--------  
  
  Your nap just does not happen that afternoon. You lay on your back in bed, instead, and stare up at the ceiling with your hands laced across your stomach, thoroughly and horribly distracted by the things you had seen in that bathroom. His holoform... it hadn't had any _nipples_. You just _cannot_ stop thinking about that... (and his pubic hair had been the same intense blue as his pigtails, you regretfully recall. Yeah. You saw that too.) You are never going to be able to scrub your mind of those images now. All future masturbation sessions are ruined.  
  
You lie there for the better part of an hour like that, with your unopened Gatorade abandoned by your bed, and then you hear the bathroom door finally click open and you shut your eyes just to be safe, only opening them when you hear footsteps approaching and feel a weight thump down on the foot of the mattress. Whirl's holoform-- fully-clothed now, thank god-- blinks back at you with its single yellow eye.  
  
"Humans don't have yellow eyes, you know," you blurt out, in lieu of something better to say. Whirl shrugs his shoulders and just kicks his legs out, thumping them against the carpet.  
  
"So what? They don't have blue hair, either, but it's _passable_. Besides, that's not important! I need you to take me somewhere today!"  
  
You raise an eyebrow.  
  
"Um- where?" You hadn't even known Whirl _knew_ about any other places on Earth, except maybe in the abstract.  
  
"Closest city. Got something I need to do. Figured you could show me around while I'm at it, give me the real Earth experience!"  
  
You push yourself up into a sitting position to look at him. That actually... sounds like it could be a lot of fun? It would certainly be a _bonding_ opportunity for you two-- one that you never even would have considered before today, considering the usual shape of him. You could have a whole evening out with just you and Whirl! Maybe even learn something new about him!  
  
"That sounds _wonderful!_ " you exclaim with a smile. Whirl kicks his legs again and then hops to his feet, apparently raring to go, reaching up to fiddle with his pigtails and tug on his hair as he urges you, "Come on then! Up and at 'em! I'm sick of being in this _house_."  
  
You allow yourself to be hurried out of bed for the sake of your budding friendship.  
  
"Alright, alright, take it easy. I'm going! I have some shopping to do anyway."  
  
____________________________  
  
Whirl's holoform follows you as far as the front door, and then blips out of existence. You pause, confused, and momentarily concerned, but then you hear someone shouting from across the lawn and see Whirl-- the _real_ Whirl-- hollering at you and waving, and those fears fade away. You're really going to have to ask him how that all works, because that is some _weird_ science bullshit.  
  
Whirl lopes across the yard on his gangly stilt legs to meet you halfway.  
  
"You ready to go?" he prompts, scrunching himself down to talk to you at his full thirty-feet of height. You double-check for your phone and your wallet and then nod, gesturing towards your car.  
  
"Yup. But you know, you're going to have to come with me as a _human_. There's _no_ way your actual body is gonna fit in my car."  
  
Whirl just stares at you. You stare back, growing confused, and eventually tilt your head at him in silent question.  
  
"...You want me to ride in _that?"_ he finally asks. Good lord, you'd think you'd asked him to jump off a _bridge_ with that tone-- you're a little offended on your car's behalf. Sure, it's older and kind of shitty, and it hasn't really been washed recently, but it's still perfectly drive-able and more than capable of making the trip. You tell him as much, and watch him do his best to make a face in response.  
  
"No offense to your little scrapheap of a car--" _Offense taken, damn,_ "But why would anyone drive when they could _fly?_ I'll just take you in my alt mode!"  
  
Now it's your turn to look at him oddly.  
  
"Uhm... you can _fly?_ ...Did I know that? I don't think I knew that!"  
  
No, you think you would _definitely_ remember if your local giant robot told you he could fly. Whirl goggles at you like you've just smacked him upside the head for saying so, and then he sputters and starts to laugh, cackling and slamming a claw on the ground. You're forced to scurry backwards for the sake of your health, listening to him static-spit laughter.  
  
"Holy scrap, you're _right!_ " he exclaims. "I can't believe this! I just completely forgot to-- wow, hold onto your helm, tiny," he says, and takes a few steps backward, bracing those skinny backwards-jointed legs of his before just _launching_ himself into the air. Now you remember something similar-- on the first day you'd met him, he'd done the same thing as now, except _that_ time he'd been injured and had plummeted back down like a stone. _This_ time he's doing something entirely different.  
  
He's transforming. For a split second you think he's shifting his size again, mass-displacement, he calls it, but then, no, his shape continues to warp and his limbs tuck in and his head disappears somewhere past his cockpit--  
  
And he's a helicopter. He's a _goddamn helicopter_. God, now the cockpit is making so much more sense.  
  
_"No fucking way,_ " you shout over the wind from his spinning blades, grabbing your own head and jumping on the spot for something to do with all of your sudden excited energy. "No fucking _way!_ How could you not _tell me this?!_ Whirl, can you still see me?" You wave your hands in the air as if to flag him down, breaking out into a grin when you hear his voice crackle down to you the same as it always does.  
  
"Of course I can! Now hurry up, get in here already!"  
  
His tone is pitchy in the way you've learned means excitement as he lands, and you scurry over with equal enthusiasm as he pops open a door for you, making a shuddery sound as you clamber inside. You've never been inside a helicopter before! You plop yourself down in the pilot's seat and peer out the cockpit window, squealing with excitement.  
  
" _Urgh_ , you're so _squishy_ in there--" he says, his voice coming from all around you as the door slides shut again without any help from you. You apologetically pat his steering wheel, or whatever you call the equivalent on a helicopter.  
  
"Sorry. Is this, like- weird? Do you guys do this kind of thing with each other back home, or is this like..."  
  
~~_Don't say vore, don't say vore_~~  
  
"...Um, kind of creepy?"  
  
Whirl snorts and snickers again and you're honestly a little surprised that you can't feel it from your seat, seeing that your seat... _is_ him. Oh, cripes, you're gonna wig yourself out at this rate. You focus on holding tight to the steering wheel and trying to fight off the sudden waves of vertigo as Whirl takes off into the sky, instead.  
  
"It's fine, it's whatever! Just not used to having something made of _meat_ in there, is all," he replies, with another over-exaggerated shuddering sound. And that's a valid complaint, you suppose. You pat his wheel again and then turn your attention to the ground below.  
  
You've... oh, god, you've never been this high up before. And it's exhilarating, yes, but also _terrifying_ , to see the world rush by underneath you in a yellow-tinted blur through the cockpit glass. You lean yourself back hard against your seat and clutch onto the fabric of it in an effort to stabilize your abruptly-tossing stomach.  
  
"Ow." Whirl says.  
  
"Oh. Shit. Sorry."  
  
You pet the fabric apologetically and just try not to focus on thinking about how Whirl could actually feel that.  
  
________________________________  
  
Thankfully, you don't toss your lunch, even though Whirl flies like an _absolute_ goddamn maniac. It's how he got his name, he'd informed you gleefully, in between sharp turns to the sides and meaningless twirling descents that all felt just a few degrees shy of turning into an actual crash-landing-- as you finally stagger out of his cockpit and into the scrubby little patch of woods he's chosen as a landing pad, you make a mental note to never, ever let him fly you anywhere again.  
  
You hunch over in the bushes to catch your breath and listen to the sounds of him transforming back into robot mode behind you.  
  
"Lightweight," he remarks. You swat your hand in his general direction without looking up.  
  
"-- _Oh_ that was such a bad feeling. Are- are we ready to go or what?"  
  
"Ready when you are, buddy!"  
  
Whirl punctuates his statement by activating his holoform once more, having it blink into existence a few feet to your left and flick its fingers at you in a lazy salute. You sigh shakily and straighten up.  
  
"Okay. Um... wait, can you see out of both bodies at once?"  
  
"Yeah. Why?"  
  
"Just wondering-- okay, then I think you should probably leave your, uh, _real_ body here, in helicopter mode... that way, if anyone sees you, at least they won't call the police?"  
  
Not that an abandoned helicopter sitting out in the woods wasn't weird by itself, but, you know. The lesser of two evils. Whirl just shrugs- or rather, his holoform shrugs- and his robot body shifts itself back into alt mode again, where it still sits amongst the dry grass and the skinny little trees about as inconspicuously as a painted target.  
  
It's going to have to do.  
  
Whirl links his avatar's arm with yours and pulls you along.  
  
"Hop to it, tiny! City's that way! Civilization awaits!"  
  
_____________________  
  
As it turns out, cities apparently aren't that much different where Whirl comes from.  
  
"Bar. Uhhh, restaurant. Archives."  
  
"Library."  
  
"Whatever. Bar again!"  
  
Whirl's voice is too loud as he points familiar things out to you, hanging all over you in a tumble of excited limbs, and you try to shush him more than once only for your requests to be ignored-- after his spending weeks cooped up in the house and the barn, you suppose you can sympathize with him, but you _do_ wish he'd stop making loud-mouthed comments about other peoples' clothing as they pass you by.  
  
"Hey, do you wanna go get drunk?" Whirl asks, derailing his own train of thought about the greasy ponytail on the guy who'd just crossed the street in front of you. His holoav has a _weird_ amount of weight to it, and he almost drags you to the ground when he loops his arm around your neck. You squawk and attempt to right yourself.  
  
"It's five in the afternoon, Whirl!"  
  
"So?"  
  
You gently push his arm off of you and shake your head.  
  
"So humans-- at least not most, at least not _me_ \-- don't usually start getting drunk until the sun goes down. Being smashed is part of the night life, I guess."  
  
As incredible as it would be to see what Whirl looks like absolutely hammered, you're also worried that he'd start chatting with strangers, and give himself away; while you imagine most folks would happily put that down to drunken rambling, you just can't _risk_ running into any one person who might end up discovering his true, Cybertronian identity. You don't trust the public to keep their mouths shut any further than you can throw them.  
  
"Wow. A city of prudes," Whirl muses, allowing you to push him away as he starts to idly braid his hair. "Have you _ever_ had _any_ fun?"  
  
"I have fun! We're having fun right now!"  
  
Whirl looks at you from under his lashes, a half-stifled smirk on his lips.  
  
"Are we?"  
  
You take a chance- you smack him. It's not an _actual_ hit, of course, just a sock on the shoulder between friends, but you're aware that you're still taking a risk by doing so at all, pretty aware by this point of his generally volatile nature. Your palm thwacks off of his arm and Whirl freezes, his eyebrows shooting upwards in surprise.  
  
You both hesitate.  
  
There's just enough of a pause for you to think that you're about to die, and then Whirl reels back and shoves you in the side of the head so hard that he nearly pushes you over, leaving you reflexively scrabbling for something to stop your fall. You catch yourself around his neck with a grip that would choke a human person, and watch him beam down at you as you dangle from him like an idiot.  
  
"Alright, alright," he relents, dragging you back upright by the collar of your shirt, "It's better than the _barn_."  
  
That is a win and you will _take_ it. Friendship score: now a solid one!  
_____  
  
The rest of your trip to the city is pretty busy. The two of you make it to the bookstore, pawn shop, and a coffee shop in decent time, but then when rush hour hits and everyone else starts getting off work, traffic slows to a crawl, leaving you to weave through the crush on the sidewalk with Whirl trying to use his pointy little elbows like a weed-whacker. Your attempts to restrain him are only partially successful.  
  
"Dude, what's the rush?" you ask, struggling to keep up with Whirl as he shoulders people aside and easily ignores the dirty looks it gets him. As his companion, those glares fall to _you_ next, and you wither under the force of them, ducking your head. You catch up to Whirl and grab his wrist.  
  
"I came here for a reason, remember?" he says, jerking his arm out of your grasp and then shoving his hands into his pockets. He radiates excess energy, restrained motion, and if it weren't for the chipped-toothed smile on his face you'd be worried he was aggravated. Instead, he just comes off as fidgety.  
  
"Oh. That's right. Where are we going?"  
  
You think you're headed towards the part of town with a little less foot traffic, the slightly dingier part of town without the big clusters of shopping centers. You've only been this way a couple of times, and it makes you stick a little closer to him instinctively, starting to toe the edge of your comfort zone.  
  
Whirl tips his head back to gesture with his chin at something above the rooftops.  
  
"Radio tower. And that's because-- before you ask-- guess what I brought with me?"  
  
You barely manage to open your mouth before Whirl reaches down further into his pocket and pulls out something familiar, flashing it to you in the palm of his hand. He then grins as you spin on the spot to make sure no one else is within eyesight, whispering, "The _radio?_ It looks-- what did you do to it? It looks smaller. And where were you _keeping_ it?"  
  
"Oh, subspace pocket."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Nothin'! Anyway," Whirl exclaims, tucking the radio back into the front pocket on his overalls, "I just took off all the extra outside bits so I could get to the internals. We're gonna do a little hotwiring!"  
  
Oh. Ohhhh, no, that is so illegal.  
  
" _Ohhh_ no, Whirl, no no no that's _so_ illegal," you protest, as his plan clicks into place. He's going to try to wire _his_ radio to the tower to boost the signal, and while you're sympathetic to his plight, you still really don't want to get yourself arrested while Whirl tries to find a way to un-strand himself. Unfortunately, he's got a look on his face that says he's already set on it.  
  
"Relax! You think this is the most illegal thing I've ever done?" he replies, and wow, that does absolutely nothing to set your mind at ease. Makes it worse, in fact, but Whirl is just barreling on ahead apparently with or without you, so you choke off your complaints and catch back up to him lest you lose your only manner of defense against whoever might be lurking around these seedier areas. You pass by an alleyway and only sheer force of will keeps you from grabbing his hand.  
  
"We're gonna get fuckin' arrested," you hiss at him, prickling with nerves as you approach the foot of the radio tower. It's...god, it's tall, and you've never thought anything of it before but the tower sure looks ominous now, now that you're having to think about climbing it or whatever Whirl's planning to do. Whirl just flashes you a big grin and takes a running start, hopping up onto the tower to grab hold of the ladder a few rungs up. He lets his feet dangle, supporting himself solely by his arms, and looks down at you expectantly.  
  
"You coming or not?"  
  
You grimace. As tempting as it is to follow him and get a first-hand look at whatever he's going to do, you're feeling a little queasy all of a sudden, looking up at the top of that tower, and apparently that shows on your face because Whirl snorts and rolls his eye and starts climbing, leaving you behind beneath him.  
  
"Look, chickenshit, just wait there and I'll be right back! Alright?" he calls down again. You hunch your shoulders and huff, making a face at his retreating sneakers, but manage a sulky "yeah, yeah" before you find a nice corner nearby to wait in and scrunch yourself back against the wall. With any luck, at least, Whirl will turn out to be as good a climber as he thinks he is and the two of you will get out of dodge before anyone even has a chance to find you doing something so stupid. At least the sun is on your side-- you'd spent long enough wandering around town earlier that the sun is finally starting to go down, evening coloring things in that weird glaze that makes shapes blur and fade together.  
  
You watch Whirl steadily climb, and take a moment to be mentally thankful that at least his holoav can't get hurt if he falls.  
  
You wait  
  
And wait.  
  
The tower is really tall.  
  
Eventually, you even get bored of watching Whirl's disappearing backside and dig into your pockets to get your phone, just casting a quick glance up every now and then while you steadily work your way down an Instagram rabbit hole.  
  
Like.  
  
Like.  
  
Follow that link-- like.  
  
The ambient sounds of the city drown out the sound of the footsteps until they're almost on top of you.  
  
"Hey."  
  
You jump so hard you're pretty sure that your skeleton would have flown out your mouth if it hadn't been closed, and your gaze snaps up as your heart slams itself against your ribcage.  
  
"Sorry!" the dude in front of you says, seeming surprised that you'd reacted so hard. You say nothing, watching him warily, aware that the two of you are kind of off the beaten path here and that you are currently backed into a corner. "Uh, you got any spare change?"  
  
Oh.  
  
"Um- no, sorry," you reply automatically, your hand going to your wallet in your pocket like he's going to check for himself. It's not that you're so _against_ charity, but you've watched enough true crime shows to know that you shouldn't take your eyes off a stranger in an alleyway to rummage around in your pockets. The guy gives you an easy smile, seemingly unoffended, and gestures to the watch on your wrist.  
  
"That's okay. Can you tell me the time at least?"  
  
You glance down.  
  
"It's uh, seven-forty--"  
  
He does pretty much exactly what you expected him to do. The guy grabs your phone. And he's _quick_ , barely giving you time to register what's happening before he's hopping back again, dismay warring with alarm as Guy pockets your phone and then pulls out a dinky little knife in the same motion, twitching it at you.  
  
"Wallet. Watch. Anything in your pockets," he says shortly, his demeanor oddly comfortable for the situation he's just put you in. Your heart is _thumping_ , you're being _mugged_ , and you feel like he should have some kind of ugly sneer on his face or something but he _doesn't_ , he still just, looks like a regular dude. A regular dude with a shitty little knife that you're still not willing to go toe-to-toe with.  
  
You keep your eyes on him as you fumble for your wallet, halfway in a panic.  
  
If you scream, he's gonna stab you. You've effectively fenced yourself in by picking this corner to stand in, so there's no getting past him, and you can't risk glancing up to try and get Whirl's attention without risking an attack because you looked away. The best you can do is toss your wallet past him and hope it goes far enough that you can dash away while he goes after it.  
  
You hold one hand out to him, palm out and flat, and tense your muscles in preparation to throw and run,  
  
but you don't end up even needing to, because you'd forgotten that Whirl's holoform maybe doesn't _have_ to follow the laws of _physics_ and Whirl comes plunging down nearly on top of the Guy with a speed that would have shattered every bone in a real human being's body. He lands in a crouch like fucking Spider-Man, pigtails bouncing, and neither you nor your assailant have even a moment to react before Whirl is pushing off the ground and just headbutting the Guy straight in the jaw.  
  
You can hear the crack the impact makes.  
  
"Hey, who's your friend?" Whirl asks loudly, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of your mugger realizing that his jaw might be broken. You don't answer-- shocked still, your hands fluttering helplessly at your sides-- but Whirl doesn't seem to mind your silence because he just grabs the Guy by the front of his shirt, half a foot shorter and completely unafraid, and lifts him off his feet to _throw_ him dead-ass _into the wall_. Now you manage a yelp, your emotions doing a dizzying 180 as you realize you might actually have to protect _this guy_ from _Whirl_.  
  
"Holy shit- don't kill him!" you exclaim, nearly breathless with adrenaline. Whirl shoots you a look like that's the dumbest thing he's ever heard and glances at the guy to make sure he's not getting back up before turning properly to you, his nose scrunched up.  
  
"Did he get ya?"  
  
"What?"  
  
Whirl energetically mimes the action of stabbing somebody.  
  
"Oh. N-no, no, but he took my phone--"  
  
Whirl turns back around and crouches down over Guy's groaning half-conscious body to pat at his pockets. You just watch him, kind of dumbfounded, as he retrieves your phone, a wallet that does not belong to you, and after a moment of deliberation, the pocket knife as well. He stands back up, dumps everything into the front pocket of his overalls, and then cocks his leg back and kicks the guy in the head in a way that makes your own teeth rattle to look at.  
  
He returns to you grinning and rubs the toe of his shoe into the dirt.  
  
"Well, I'm done with my thing! You ready to go?"  
  
You gape at him.  
  
Whirl elbows your shoulder.  
  
"That was rhetorical, by the way. We actually better get outta here before anybody else shows up."  
  
Clumsily, you return your wallet to your pocket and turn around, casting a last worried glance at your would-be mugger who you're pretty sure probably has a concussion now-- and Whirl grabs hold of your wrist and sets off at a run, dragging you along.  
  
You dash along with him and try not to notice the way your cheeks suddenly feel way too hot as the two of you sprint away with his nails digging into your arm.


End file.
